Destinations clients have the unique advantage of having access to the latest in Flight Training Technology: the Redbird Full-Motion FMX Flight Simulator.

SAVE TIME. SAVE MONEY. SAVE LIVES.

Learning to fly partial panel is an important skill. Learning to identify failed instruments is a Life Saving Skill. Having a flight instructor inform you that an instrument has failed is not realistic. Having instruments fail realistically is the ONLY way to train.The FMX’s are 3 axis Full Motion AATDs (Advanced Aviation Training Devices.)

There are certain statistics that seem like they’ll never change: the high school dropout rate, the percentage of marriages that end in divorce, the prevalence of tax fraud. The same used to be true of plane crashes that were due to pilot error. Despite a long list of aviation reforms, from mandatory pilot layovers to increased classroom training, that percentage refused to budge from 1940 to 1990, holding steady at around 65 percent. It didn’t matter what type of plane was being flown or where the plane was going. The brute fact remained: most aviation deaths were due to bad decisions in the cockpit. But then, starting in the early 1990s, the percentage of crashes attributed to pilot error began to decline rapidly.

…less than 30 percent of all plane accidents, with a 71 percent reduction in the number of accidents caused by poor decision-making.

What caused the dramatic reduction in pilot error? The first factor was the introduction in the mid-1980s of realistic flight simulators. For the first time, pilots could practice making decisions.

And they could do all this without leaving the ground.

These simulators revolutionized pilot training. “The old way of teaching pilots was the ‘chalk and talk’ method,” says Jeff Roberts, the group president of civil training at CAE, the largest manufacturer of flight simulators.

“The problem with this approach,” Roberts says, “is that everything was abstract. The pilot has this body of knowledge, but they’d never applied it before.”

The benefit of a flight simulator is that it allows pilots to internalize their new knowledge. Instead of memorizing lessons, a pilot can train the emotional brain, preparing the parts of the cortex that will actually make the decision when up in the air. As a result, pilots who are confronted with a potential catastrophe during a real flight…already know what to do. They don’t have to waste critical moments trying to remember what they learned in the classroom.

Simulators also take advantage of the way the brain learns from experience.

“We want pilots to make mistakes in the simulator,” Roberts says. “The goal is to learn from those mistakes when they don’t count, so that when it really matters, you can make the right decision.” This approach targets the dopamine system, which improves itself by studying its errors. As a result, pilots develop accurate sets of flight instincts. Their brains have been prepared in advance.

The safety of flight is a testament to the possibility of improvement. The reduction in the pilot-error rate is a powerful reminder that mistakes are not inevitable, that planes don’t have to crash.[gn_divider top=”0″]